Anthony Low. Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton. Pp. xxii+242. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003. $60

Abstract

This latest book from the pen of Anthony Low has been long in the making. He started work on it in 1995, and all of its chapters but the last have appeared in earlier forms in various journals over the past five or six years. Its material will therefore be to some extent familiar to readers of this review, but, even so, the book version is worth a second reading. With the exception of a weaker chapter on The Wanderer, Low's discussions of the religious matrix of the development of subjectivity from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance—from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Paradise Lost—presents a compelling argument, carefully articulated and elegantly delivered. This argument is based in a refutation of the radical postmodernist position that there is no such thing as a universal human nature. Low regards this as an overstatement of the case, arguing that, while human nature is clearly not immutable, parts of it are ‘hard-wired’ (p. 191). In other words, there is bound to be some continuity in human subjectivity through the ages, even if there have also been seismic shifts in la condition humaine from time to time. He is particularly concerned to demonstrate the continuity of certain aspects of subjectivity from the medieval to the early modern periods, while recognizing the extent of the change which brought in the latter and (as many aver) led to the modern age and eventually to postmodernity. Religious institutions provide the key to continuity and change in Low's account: confession in Gawain, penance in the first book of The Faerie Queene, purgatory in Hamlet, and two complex and satisfying theological readings of conscience and ‘the fall into subjectivity’ in Paradise Lost bring the volume to a close.